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Genders and the method of loci | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5537 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 1 of 10 07 February 2013 at 6:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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We've had some really interesting discussions about word gender recently:
How to cope with genders? Building more native-like gender system? In particular, the remarks from Arekkusu and other folks who speak a language with gender gave me some really good material to think about. Based on this discussion, I've formed a very tentative hypothesis:
If this hypothesis were true, then one possible solution would be to find a way to memorize gender very quickly. And it turns out that humans actually have different kinds of memory, and that some are faster than others. In particular, "spatial" memory is very fast, and this fact has been exploited since antiquity. Wikipedia explains The method of loci:
What I've been trying. This seems fairly promising, and I've been playing around with it lately. Here's my general approach: 1. I picked two different towns that I know well. One of these towns is for masculine nouns, and the other town is for feminine nouns. Since there are more masculine nouns than feminine nouns in French, I use my current town for masculine nouns, and my old university town for feminine ones. 2. When I notice the gender of a word in input, I first check whether I could have predicted that gender using the word ending. If so, then I don't do need to do anything else. 3. I visualize an object or event which represents the noun, and I locate that visualization in the appropriate town. All the usual memory tricks apply: Make it physically vivid and a bit odd, and consider using multiple senses. For example, un crâne (a skull, masculine) becomes a skull sitting on my dining room table. 4. When I want to know the gender of a word, I just have to remember where I "saw" that object or event. Since I'm trying to memorize discrete facts, and not a list, I don't try to visualize a journey. The preliminary results are promising. I can memorize genders more quickly than I could with non-spatial visualization techniques, and I remember them longer and more reliably. It's feasible to slowly read a page in a novel, spend 2 or 3 seconds memorizing each unknown noun gender, and still have excellent recall 24 or 48 hours later. Indeed, it's actually possible to remember the gender and forget the word! Anyway, this is still just an experimental technique, but I'd love to compare notes with other folks on HTLAL. Edited by emk on 07 February 2013 at 6:05pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5386 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 2 of 10 07 February 2013 at 7:09pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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After some reflection, my instinct tells me that intermediate solutions, such as the one you suggest, are not generally necessary, nor helpful as a whole, except in specific cases where the gender of one particular word (or any of its other features, for that matter) is proving hard to recall. In remembering gender, I don’t do anything special, but I’ll try to explain how I think it works for me. Forgive the slightly esoteric feel to the explanation.
I just started learning Romanian (which has gender), and I’m using Assimil. Consequently, the words practically always come up in a sentence or within a group of words. There is almost always an indication of gender to be found in an accompanying article, adjective or pronoun. It is my impression that as I gain an understanding of what these indications are, I gradually acquire a sense that I am entering into the realm of a given gender as I make my way into the noun phrase. Over time, the noun and this sensation fuse, and the production of the word (or the intent thereof) instantly calls back this impression and leads me to the appropriate realm. Just like when you are creating a sentence and your brain knows that you are entering various domains (subject phrase, direct or indirect object phrase, time phrase, etc.), I feel like the road forks and I enter a feminine or masculine “realm” wherein all words henceforth follow one of the few possible forms that one gender calls for. Similarly, as you begin to structure a German sentence, you may proceed to step into accusative mode, and then further into accusative masculine mode, which in turn leaves only a few possible models (definite, indefinite, with/without an article, with/without an adjective, etc.). One gets better at doing this at lightning speed after a fair amount of practice, which implies both memorizing the appropriate possible forms, and learning to produce them aptly. I can draw a parallel with Japanese pitch accent (whereby, briefly said, every syllable is pronounced in a high or low pitch). There is no written indication of a word’s pitch and it’s fairly hard to remember. As I was trying to create a series of lessons to teach this (another project I might never finish), I proceeded to write all non-accented words in blue and all accented words in red. In any case – and of course, this only applies to me and the way I learn --, I found that when I do remember a word’s proper pitch, it’s not because I remember the colour I gave the word, even though I generally tend to be a pretty visual learner, but because prior correct production of the word leads me to the right realm, which in turn directs me to all of the associated consequences this has on the pitch of the following syllables. What could be seen as a binary system is actually reinforced by the whole of the consequences brought on by either possible realm, which in turn feeds the memory. I think we learn the gender of a word because we gain a sense of the realm it calls for. And we gain this sense first by learning how gender manifests itself in the noun phrase, and secondly, by using the word in its proper grammatical model often enough. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5987 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 3 of 10 07 February 2013 at 7:26pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Arekkusu, I am just a little curious as to whether a native speaker of a language which has genders, such as yourself, might experience genders in another language in a different way to a native speaker of a language which does not have genders?
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| sans-serif Tetraglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4564 days ago 298 posts - 470 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, German, Swedish Studies: Danish | Message 4 of 10 07 February 2013 at 7:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
While I agree with you, I don't see this as a strong argument against raw memorization. Memorizing vocabulary, genders, grammar points or any other kind of "language data" doesn't directly translate into language ability, but such knowledge can useful as an internal error-checking mechanism, or sometimes as a mental dictionary of sorts. Both of these are tools that enable a language learner to go out and use the language, which then leads to the desired end-result: fully internalized, effortlessly accessible vocabulary, syntax, articles, and the whole deal. Edited by sans-serif on 07 February 2013 at 8:47pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4849 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 5 of 10 07 February 2013 at 8:19pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think this question can clearly be answered with a yes. Native speakers of a language with genders are already accustomed to this concept, while a native speaker of e.g. English has to deal with something absolutely alien. It's easier for a German than for an Englishman to learn Russian, because gender and cases are already part of his linguistic equipment. Edited by Josquin on 07 February 2013 at 8:19pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6475 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 6 of 10 07 February 2013 at 8:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I tend to learn word gender from context as well. If you're going to use a mnemonic for
the word itself though, you can easily have that mnemonic include the gender. In visualization, make the object red/blue/grey for feminine/masculine/neuter. In sentences or situations, some sites recommend using figures like ballerinas, boxers, robots or certain celebrities to signify each gender. This is also what I did for a while when memorizing Chinese tones. I think you'll find that imagining an object being used by a ballerina/boxer/robot or whatever is more vivid and more reliable than imagining it in a certain town. The Loci method is best for remembering things in order, for example lines of poems. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5537 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 10 07 February 2013 at 9:30pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Thank you for your detailed examples! I don't mind the "esoteric feel" at all. Just to give you an idea where I'm coming from, I'm currently debugging a problem that's giving me headaches in practice. I have a lot of passive French vocabulary that I've learned by reading and by listening to people, and a lot of it is starting to activate fairly nicely. But once I get outside of that daily core vocabulary, I'm missing a lot of gender information. Words between 5,000 and 10,000 on the frequency lists are especially obnoxious. (Below 5,000, I often just know the gender. Above 10,000, I don't yet care.) This is exacerbated by the fact that I'm an English speaker learning French, which gives me a huge advantage with learning vocabulary, but no help at all with learning genders. A word like crâne is virtually transparent (thanks to "cranium"). The gender, not so much. So unless I make a conscious effort, I need maybe 2 exposures to learn the word, and 100+ to nail down the gender. And on top of that, my mental lexicon doesn't have a lifetime of practice with storing gender data. Here's the sort of words I'm dealing with, most of which have been in my passive vocabulary forever, but which didn't have reliable gender information attached:
I find that "prior correct production" also helps a lot, but only with core vocabulary that I use frequently. I'm getting into that "working toward C1" territory where there's just so much to learn, and most of it comes up quite rarely. And on the rare occasion when I get to discuss skulls, I really loathe having to stop the conversation and ask, "Est-ce que c'est un crâne ou une crâne ?" If I don't know the gender, then it's hard to exploit those opportunities for "correct production". So basically I need some way to balance out the "write speed" of my vocabulary memory and my gender memory. Or else I'm going to someday reach C2 with all sorts of lurking gender wobbliness. Anyway, this is all just experimentation, and it's far from the only tool I'm using. But it seems to produce a solid 24-hour retention rate (> 90%) with maybe 2 seconds of mnemonic setup, which compares very favorably to either non-spatial mnemonics or brute-force repetition. Of course, Your Mileage May Vary, we all have slightly different wiring, and all that. And as always, thank you to everyone for your insights! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5435 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 8 of 10 07 February 2013 at 11:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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As I say all the time, do whatever works for you. But I'm with Arekkusu on this. I suspect the @emk may be making things too complicated with his intermediate system. Here's my take on how to go about mastering the system.
First of all, the gender of the noun in question is only the first and not necessarily the most visible part of the problem. You must keep in mind that what we are talking about is gender agreement across the morpho-syntax system. The gender may be marked in the noun ending itself for most words, but it may not be marked or it may even be totally counter-intuitive. For example in French, one says LE squelette and not LA squelette. The fundamental problem is how to ascertain the right gender and then make all the morphological adjustments in all the words that refer to the main word and are gender marked. This is not easy. So, we often use determiners (articles) to mark gender but that doesn't always work (e.g. plural articles in French are not marked for gender). Then we can use adjectives that are close to the noun. That works nearly all the time but sometimes this can be tricky in French with words that begin with a vowel. I won't go into all the many many complications, but to get straight to the point, I believe in memorizing a string of words that highlight the gender agreement. For example, I would repeat "un bon squelette," "une boisson fraîche et délicieuse" numerous times to consolidate the morpho-syntactic relation. In passing, I should point out that although Spanish and French use grammatical gender, it is (or seems to me) much simpler in Spanish with a) fewer exceptions and b) less stringent morpho-syntax constraints. Edited by s_allard on 07 February 2013 at 11:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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